I had this suggestion before, but it didn't catch to people, maybe due some conservative or puritan views, or maybe for other reasons, but the fact is that over the years, the amount of plugins developed for SU increased and the complexity of tasks performed with SU require more and more of them. Therefore, the lists start to grow bigger and bigger, being increasingly difficult to find, organize, or work with the plugins.
When I previously made this suggestion, it was about distributing the plugins based on their primary use in the other menus that SketchUp has, but the response was kind of "the extensions menu is where the developers of SU intended to be the plugins" - which I have to say, is a bit limited vision, especially because they allowed free access to all menus, to put shortcuts anywhere.
This distribution would have two major benefits:
- less clutter in Extensions and Tools menus
- more intuitive organization of the plugins
I noticed several plugins that authors did, sorted in a parent menu (with the name of the author). This is perfectly fine if you have few plugins and/or if the reason for using them is mostly a sympathy for that author, but as you will have more and more plugins, remembering their FUNCTION by author's name will become an impossible task.
Another suggestion would be to give the users the option to organize their menus. If that would be possible (and I remember smustard had such option before), then users could decide the location for their own plugins.
You may say "yeah, but what you don't do it for yours, if that is what you want?" The answer to this is that with every update of that plugin, this change would be reset.
I know this would imply a bit of hassle, to require from plugin developers to change their way of creating the menus, so it can accept a menu organizer, but I don't see that as an impossible task.
I would like to know your opinions about this matter.
With love,
Derei.